One of these days, I will learn to trust you as much as you trust me, Risa.
I’ve always struggled getting and keeping Risa’s attention. Part of it is my fault. I had a bad habit of dropping treats which caused her to break her focus after every treat delivery. “Grab treat then search for potential dropped goodies” became Risa’s default. While I’ve become a bit more skilled with treat delivery, this bad habit of hers still remains. I often get better focus from her when I DON’T reward it.
On top of that, Risa is a hypervigilant dog. Because of her fears, she is constantly scanning the environment. Looking out for potentially scary things and always on alert. This makes it particularly difficult for her to maintain her focus completely on me. It’s a constant struggle which has become less problematic lately. She trusts me more now than she ever did before. She is able to pull her focus away from the environment and turn it to me instead hoping that I will keep her safe. Since I generally do protect her from the scary things, her focus on me has improved.
However, it is not always obvious that she is paying attention. As I said, she is almost constantly scanning. I generally assume if she’s not looking at me, she’s not paying attention. Over the weekend, I found out this is not necessarily the case.
During our freestyle routine on Sunday, I cued Risa to sit and wait while I walked away. The next move was her recalling to a jump over my leg. As she sat there, she turned her head away and started looking around. I feared I was losing her and recalled her early. It turns out she was paying attention to me after all as she came running without missing a beat. I should have trusted my dog.
I still wonder, though, if I will ever get complete focus from my dog when we’re working. Will she ever be capable of maintaining eye contact with me as we heel around a ring never breaking it despite whatever is going on in the room? Probably not. And, really, that’s okay. Maybe she’s not boring a hole in my head with locked-on laser vision. But she is still paying attention to me.
